Cathedral by Michael Mangels (ebook reader color screen txt) 📕

They stopped for a moment in the corridor, regarding one another appraisingly. “Thank you,” Jules said. Julian grinned down at the boy. Thank me, he thought. And then they ran together down the corridor.

Past the orderlies, who gave chase but swiftly fell behind, waving lollipops in the air in their impotent rage.

Past a very surprised Richard and Amsha Bashir, whose confused, angry shouts died away as they sprinted across the waiting room, knocking over a potted plant from which sprays of royal red, heart-shaped flowers spilled.

Past the astonished-looking members of the Starfleet Medical oral examination jury. The Vulcan’s mouth made an O of surprise as Jack’s top hat fell from his head.

Julian felt a stitch in his side and stopped to catch his breath. Jules came to a halt beside him, standing in companionable silence. Julian looked up. The Adigeon Prime hospital was gone. Seemingly kilometers above their heads, the wildly intersecting interdimensional geometries of the alien artifact soared, appearing somehow inside out.

Because I’ve been inside the thing all along. All of us from the Sagan have been inside it.

He could feel that everything he hadn’t been able to remember was flooding back to him. He stared up into the artifact’s ever-shifting skyscape of counterintuitively constructed beams, braces, and spires as he felt his body and mind surge with every genetically enhanced talent he’d feared had been lost forever. Turning his eyes back to young Jules, Julian regarded the child for a long moment before speaking.

But he was completely at a loss as to why.

“My God,” he said. “What have I just done?” Unearthly crystalline sounds, like those he’d first heard aboard the Sagan, began reverberating gently in the middle distance. Or perhaps they were coming from light-years away.

The boy smiled. “You finally recognized me.”

“I think you mean I rescued you. And it was a stupid thing for me to do, considering that it should have made whatever the artifact did to me permanent.”

“No,” Jules said with a solemn shake of his head. “It was the act of a simple but decent man.”

“But I prevented you from…having the ‘procedures.’ Where does that leave me?”

“You’ve merely cut a tether to an unhealthy part of your past,” Jules said, then pointed straight up. Julian’s neck and eyes followed the gesture. “Consider your love-hate relationship with me resolved.”

The gilded dome of the Hagia Sophia now arced majestically over their heads. The discordant yet not unpleasant music swelled through the basilica in long, reverberating strains. The cathedral’s gallery stretchedout to a remote vanishing point, restored to its full sixth-century splendor. Every painting, every tapestry, every sculpture appeared to be back in its appointed place and repaired to its original condition.

My memory cathedral.

Relief vied with incomprehension. “How?”

Jules beamed at him. “You’ll have to find your own answers, Julian,” the boy said as he began walking. Julian quickly followed, easily keeping pace as Jules moved through the gallery.

Julian felt a rush of gratitude for the inexplicable return of his mental acuity as one possible answer immediately presented itself. Making my peace with Jules must have snapped me loose from all the other quantum realities. All those other worlds in which Mother and Father never brought me to Adigeon Prime.

Jules nodded, as though he were privy to Julian’s innermost thoughts. Of course, Julian thought, how could he not be?

“That’s undoubtedly part of it,” the boy said, coming to a stop beside the staircase leading to the main library. “But not the biggest part.”

“So you’re saying that I’m missing the point about what happened here,” Julian said as he walked a short distance up the staircase. He put all his weight on the fifth step, and it made a satisfying squeaking sound in response. Just as it was supposed to.

“Yup,” the boy said.

He looked down the staircase toward Jules. “This doesn’t make sense. How could this place ‘realign my worldline’ when I actively prevented the procedures that would have turned you into me?”

Without saying a word, Jules strode toward a large stained-glass window that loomed nearby. Julian abandoned the staircase and followed the boy, noting that both of their reflections were clearly visible in the glass. Julian realized then that he was clad once again in a Starfleet duty uniform—complete with a combadge—and wondered idly what had become of the environmental suit he’d been wearing when the away team had beamed into the cathedral.

The child smiled up at Julian. “Let me give you a hint, then. Every decision you made in here was without the benefit of Adigeon Prime genetic engineering.”

“I wasn’t given much choice about that.”

“Exactly,” Jules said. “But in spite of that, you displayed courage and compassion. And not just here. Back aboard the Defiant as well.” Then the child approached him, as though seeking a brotherly embrace.

Julian put his arms around the child—and was surprised to feel the youngster’s volume seeming to diminish. Looking toward their reflected images, he watched in shock as the child’s body grew insubstantial, literally melting into his own before vanishing, wraithlike.

Except for the image of the boy’s smile, which seemed to linger on the glass a moment longer before it, too, disappeared.

In that instant, Julian came to an epiphanic understanding of his unexpected rapprochement with his long-vanished alter ego. For the first time in his life, he saw that there was no difference, at the core, between Jules and himself.

Jules never left me. He’s been with me all my life. And Adigeon Prime never changed that.

Julian looked up, taking in the vista that stretched into infinity above his head. The Hagia Sophia’s central dome had given way to the mind-bending internal geometries of the alien cathedral. A Wonderland, Julian thought, recalling a beloved bit of verse from his childhood.

Ever drifting down the stream

Lingering in the golden gleam

Life, what is it but a dream?

The combadge on his chest began speaking, but he paid scant attention to it. Instead, he continued staring up into the infinite, exultant. Himself once again.